In my reader there is a saying that goes like this; [face=SPIonic]ko/poj ko/pon lu/ei[/face]I think I get the drift but I am not sure.
Toil dissolves toil.
In other words doing the toil now prevents hardship later. Is that right?

Hmm... I'm not too sure about your translation Thomas... luw is normally only translated as save when talking about saving persons. Destroy or dissolve don't sound as good of course ...
Not sure what it means exactly though, maybe it's as Thomas said, you work now and save doing work later, but I'm not sure, I mean it depends on the context. It could be like that, but my guess is that this is a play on words, that is the word kopos has two meanings and both are used in this sentence.
kopos means:
a) tiredness
b) work/toil
so 'tiredness destroys work', as you can't toil or work when you're tired.

Hmm... save was better than spare... eh... which dictionary are you using? My dictionary is quite limited listing only about three basic possible translations of luw in act./pass., but I couldn't find that meaning (spare) in the Liddell on the perseus site either.

Thanks guys.
Thomas' rendering does fit in the context.
The Little Liddell does have as one of its meanings; to relax, to weaken.
If it weakens or relaxes the future toil, it saves you from doing that much then.
Kind of like, "A stitch in time saves nine"

ah... I thought you were trying to give an exact translation in your second post... I didn't realise you were just trying to make the meaning of the sentence more clear . I understand what you mean and as I said I don't actually know what the meaning of this ancient Greek proverb is for sure. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

The boy who wrote this proverb was describing the drudgery of doing math repetitions, learning the multiplication tables etc.
Then he says [face=SPIonic]ko/poj ko/pon lu/ei [/face]I didn't go into the context because I thought that this might be a well known proverb. Oops.